Look at the relative ages of the DC people vs. the Marvel people and it makes sense. We came of age when Marvel was doing the cool stuff and DC was mostly dull*. Marvel really sucked in the mid-90s when y'all were coming up, and DC was a lot better overall then.

*Tons of exceptions, but the overall perception when I was a kid was that DC heroes were mostly stodgy and old-fashioned.

EDIT: Oh, a lot of deep comics nerds loved DC for the batshit continuity, but I wasn't a comic-book store type until I was older and reading more indie works. As a kid, the newstand casual readers broke overwhelmingly for Marvel.

Look at the relative ages of the DC people vs. the Marvel people and it makes sense. We came of age when Marvel was doing the cool stuff and DC was mostly dull*. Marvel really sucked in the mid-90s when y'all were coming up, and DC was a lot better overall then.

*Tons of exceptions, but the overall perception when I was a kid was that DC heroes were mostly stodgy and old-fashioned.

EDIT: Oh, a lot of deep comics nerds loved DC for the batshit continuity, but I wasn't a comic-book store type until I was older and reading more indie works. As a kid, the newstand casual readers broke overwhelmingly for Marvel.

This is a sound hypothesis, I'd say. Imprinting that happens at the age when you discover comics. I read Superman, Batman, and LSH when I was a kid, but they never really captured my imagination like Marvel, which did such a good job of conveying that all their comics were part of some epic narrative.

True story: that was the last straw for superhero comics for me for nearly a decade.It's when Marvel lost their fastball.

I had recently ditched the X-books that I used to love because they had gotten so fucking grim and confusing. Batman was still deep in Knightfall and the aftermath, which in hindsight was a better idea than I thought (replace Batman with the ultimate 90s Grimdark version to show why Bruce still mattered) but which sucked in execution.

True story: that was the last straw for superhero comics for me for nearly a decade.It's when Marvel lost their fastball.

As I said to Kory in another thread not too long ago, because he said the same thing as you two, the second clone saga is what brought me back after over a decade away. I read about the controversy in a newspaper—the Spider-man Expatriates or something like that—and decided to investigate. It was all so crazy, but it also hearkened back to the point when I first discovered comics, right at the tail end of the first clone story, and I got sucked back in despite the clusterfuck of it all.

Also, Marvel's Secret Empire was a superb clusterfuck. Horribly marketed due to a dubious premise that pissed off a lot of fans, grind thru ten issues of hyper-violence porn, and then wind it up with a lazy status quo ante resolution (tho maybe some people will remain dead until they're resurrected). A premise that could have generated a meaningful story, but it was ultimately pointless other than to jerk around fans' attachment to beloved characters. The whole "someone should get fired for that" outrage gets thrown around too much, but this was so poorly handled at every level and stage that those most responsible should be axed.